Saturday, December 29, 2012

The idea of a Biennale, in order to provide a stage for modern Indian art,
has been around a long time. Indian art was to be set off against a potpourri of global art. The first
Biennale ideas in India were mooted long ago and one was even held without a
second edition to follow. Whether this will happen in the case of the Kochi
Muziris Biennale (KMB) will be known only in 2014. Incisive questions have
been raised about the lack disclosure of how public funds (Rs 50 million) were
used:

Yet KMB has descended upon the Fort
Kochi, an under-prepared small town with none of the splendid viewing spaces or
neatly kept public thoroughfares equal to hosting a Biennale for India’s outpouring
of contemporary art.

The exhibition galleries in Fort Kochi are little
more than dusty old warehouses, for decades fallen into disrepair, and nothing
tangible has been done to refurbish the decrepit hallways and crumbling wooden/brick
stairways at the main venue, Aspinwall House, on Calvetty Road. It is an old warehouse
on the estuary of the Cochin harbour where spices, coir, rubber and other goods in trade were stored before shipment. Except for a coat of paint on the external
façade of the main portal, nothing has been done to make the warehouses a
people-friendly or art-friendly space. The air is stagnant and musty, the
humidity near 100%, and there are no exhaust fans in the cavernous halls.

For the sum of Rs 50 an art-lover can
gain entrance to each of the venues. But if Aspinwall is decaying and stumble-prone,
the other two sites further along the same road are in a greater state of
deterioration. Only in our chalta hai Bharat would a foundation set
up for the express purpose of providing a platform for artists from India and
the world (Sweden, Australia, Scotland, Iran, China, Egypt, …) be satisfied with
such arrangements.

What impelled me was curiosity, and
it was the same for all the others, the great majority of whom were not
art-lovers, but like all Indians inexorably drawn to a mela. What then could one make of the artistic attempts of those who were invited
to display their works?

One of the first layouts awaiting the
viewer upon entering the first hallway was called ‘Dutty’, a plastic screen with
splotches of dirt on it with hosepipes on the floor leaking water onto a muddy
floor. It symbolised what’s dirty in the world, not something anybody walking in
from Calvetty street needed reminding of. I forget who erected this curtain on the
world’s dirt and its offshoots (e.g. mosquitoes, again an oppressive nuisance
in Fort Kochi). But let it pass.

Next to it was Vivek Suhasini’s photographic
re-imagination of The Last Supper, set now in Gaza, not far from the original
scene, with black burqa clad women gathered
around a table set with bred rolls and fruit. The lighting heightens the sense
of impending tragedy:

Last Supper in Gaza

Vivek has a another series of backlit
photographic films in which he uses the two faces that Picasso often gave to
portraits of women (Portrait of Dora Maar), and uses his own profile as one of
the faces while impressing on it the face of some other well-known personality.
Here’s an example:

Further down the same long passage
hang some of the artistic creations of Maya Arulpragasam better known as the pop
singer, M.I.A. She has devoted much
craft and art to producing holographic 3-D designs mounted on mirrors:

Sumedh Rajendran in the adjoining space
has installed a blocky 3-D art in wood with black boots. You may like the crisp
lines and sweeping curves and the odd disarrangement:

As you exit the first long hallway to
re-enter the light, there stands a small pyramid that I could only associate with
the glass pyramid at the entrance to the Louvre Museum:

In another darkened room (why so much
darkness one has to ask) is a moving tribute to an old school teacher-turned-seed-farmer’s lifelong attempt to gather
varieties of rice suited to all climes in his small 2-hectare farm This
remarkable man is Natbar Sarangi; little wooden boxes along the wall contain
the 350 varieties he has grown and archived. A little book tells the story, but
it is hard to read in poor illumination and standing in the stifling atmosphere
is even more enervating.

Legend for Natbar Sarangi's 350 varieties of rice planted on his 2-hectare farm

Sidling along the walls of the
passageway you enter what is labelled as a Conservatory, a place to store old
toys and cast away amusements. It is a fine piece of buffoonery to see this figure of a
clownish man on a dog blowing on a horn:

There is a Scotsman’s (Dylan
Martorell) experiment in the next tenement, a kind of Rube Goldberg device to employ
programmed actuators striking with a stick on various surfaces, in the
expectation that a pleasing rhythm might result. Euphony is in the ear of the
listener to this ensemble:

The next exhibit saturates the senses
with an overpowering aroma of jeera
before you even come around the corner to glimpse it. It looks like nothing so much as an attempt at an
Alexander Calder mobile, with aluminium degchis
filled with jeera powder and
agitated, to produce a heavy spice scent:

In an outdoor covered space outside
stands artist Jonas Staal's tribute to revolutions that have swept the world – ‘the
supressed political subconscious of so-called democratic states’, he calls it.
They are the iconic flags that have carried the hopes of small groups denied rights
in some corner or the other of the world:

One of the largest in the sheer number of
exhibits is photographer Atul Dodiya’s tribute to those who have put modern
Indian art on the map. Well-known artists are there, and relatively obscure
artists too, upon whose labours ultimately rest the achievements of Indian art. They
are pictured in his frank naturalistic portraits, often in the company of others:

In the attic of a building in the Aspinwall
complex stand these slanted tiled roofs set up perhaps as a tribute to the
ubiquitous Kerala tiled roofs:

Nearby, in a disorderly clutter, granite
holes lie around, yearning to be filled, or are they merely cast-off grinding
stones? This is by Sheela Gowda and Christoph Storz:

As if to reinforce the clutter, artist
Subodh Gupta has suspended a Kerala vanji
(boat) filled with found objects — trash of the
kind that is commonly scattered about in Fort Kochi's ill-kept streets and would
not have been hard to find:

One of the meticulously designed
scenes is by artist Vivan Sundaram. It might be the scene of an excavation of a
lost city in ruins, constructed out of broken shards of pottery. The topography
of the red terra-cotta is alluring:

It is nice to come upon an actual artist
at such a Biennale. Here is Vivek Suhasini with my daughter, Michal:

After a gulp of fresh
air in the open and some conversation we were waved to the upper floor of Aspinwall on the
right hand side. Artist Clifford Charles has depicted the alienation in the
modern world, and gone to town with the second work below:

If this below were in greyscale it could
have been the surface waves in a Japanese sand garden, for meditation. But its
sheer brilliance of colour transformed it instead into a Holi scene:

In the next room these swirls of
colour, blue, green and beige, are the work of the artist, Zhang Enli. We need
not seek their signification, because there is none intended:

In the next several small rooms artist
TN Upendranath uses his body and skin in several levels of undress, to
represent what he claims are a 'reflection of psychological & sociological
interpretations,' whatever that means. It is best to view the works
and ponder awhile, and pass on. Reading words on the subject will often spoil
the experience, especially if they were written by a publicity hack.

The next work is an exquisite etching
on rock by Siji Krishnan. His fertile imagination exposes a woman trapped in a
dragonfly's body. In the second close-up you can see genial animals caressing
her body:

Photographer Anup Thomas seems to
have a fascination for men in uniform. The primates of various Christian
churches in Kerala are standing in full regalia beside their palaces:

Further along, a string of jagged
copper plates align themselves to form a median strip. This artist is in search
of patterns and has found one by stringing
together perfectly unremarkable artefacts - art by aggregation it might be
called:

There is a wonderful black and white
short film on the washing away of an island in the delta in Bangladesh. What’s remarkable
is the quick artistic hand of a potter drawing on wet clay the topography of
the island and the structures on it. The rising tide flows in to obliterate the
clay map itself that he has sketched with such wondrous facility. A lesson for global
warming perhaps:

'Hallo, how are you,' says the legend
on this exotic abstraction:

We learn from a map near the exit about the Roman trade routes to India in the 1st century AD -- Barygaza (Bharuch in
Gujarat) and Muziris (near Pattanam), in Kerala:

The on-going Muziris archaeological
excavations are shown in this photo collage:

One cannot leave an art exhibition
without buying a few books. The DC Books store has a few inspiring signs — We read to know we
are not alone (C.S. Lewis) and There is no friend as loyal as a book (Ernest Hemingway):

The Indian anchor trick at Pepper
House by Anup Mathew is worth seeing if you care to walk half a kilometre down Calvetty
road:

For sheer craftsmanship, Sudarshan
Shetty’s intricate trellis (jhali) in
wood scores high. It is, perhaps, the only object I coveted upon exiting the
galleries:

His 'swan sculpture' too will stand out
anywhere:

Hossein Valamanesh, born in Iran and settled in
Australia, has set up a meditation room with cylindrical pillars of light
surrounded by (Indian) carpets:

The only half-serious attempt at sculpture of the
human body was by KP Krishnakumar:

Posted by
Management - Learning from Experiences by Reflection
at
7:31 PM

3 comments:

Anonymous
said...

Thanks so much for the excellent coverage of local artists. Enjoyed it very much and the photographs are excellent. Nimmi